The Chair of the Canadian Swine Health Board says initiatives aimed at reducing the risk of the transmission of disease to pigs offer benefits for other livestock species and humans.
The 2012 Canadian Swine Health Forum, slated for Wednesday and Thursday in Winnipeg, will bring together pork producers, swine veterinarians, representatives of government and other industry stakeholders to discuss initiatives aimed at protecting pigs from disease.
Canadian Swine Health Board chair Florian Possberg says it’s hard to know what problems have been averted because they never happened but we do know we’ve gotten ahead of some of threats to our industry.
A lot of activities are not high profile in the day to day operations of producers’ businesses.
One of the things that we have focused on is on farm biosecurity which we have been able to bring to a large percentage of our producers across Canada.
That has been high profile and I think the consensus of our producers would be that that’s a valuable program that produced positive results and long term benefits of our industry.
Other activities are less obvious.
For example we’re funding some genomics research that could bring relief to disease by putting resistance into our animals.
There’s quite a broad spectrum of activities.
Some are quite visible and some of them are not very visible but we really do believe we’re being a real positive impact on our industry.
Possberg notes there’s quite a number of diseases that affect animal species as well as humans so it goes beyond just the health of the swine industry.
He says if we work together, farmers and the public, we can protect not only our livestock but also our people.
